{{Choking smog all but shut down one of northeastern China’s largest cities on Monday, forcing schools to suspended classes, snarling traffic and closing the airport, in the country’s first major air pollution crisis of the winter.}}
An index measuring PM2.5, or particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), reached a reading of 1,000 in some parts of Harbin, the gritty capital of northeastern Heilongjiang province and home to some 11 million people.
A level above 300 is considered hazardous, while the World Health Organisation recommends a daily level of no more than 20.
The smog not only forced all primary and middle schools to suspend classes, but shut the airport and some public bus routes, the official Xinhua news agency reported, blaming the emergency on the first day of the heating being turned on in the city for winter. Visibility was reportedly reduced to 10 meters.
The smog is expected to continue for the next 24 hours.
Air quality in Chinese cities is of increasing concern to China’s stability-obsessed leadership because it plays into popular resentment over political privilege and rising inequality in the world’s second-largest economy.
Domestic media have run stories describing the expensive air purifiers government officials enjoy in their homes and offices, alongside reports of special organic farms so cadres need not risk suffering from recurring food safety scandals.
The government has announced plans over the years to tackle the pollution problem but has made little apparent progress.
Users of China’s popular Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging site reacted with both anger and bitter sarcasm over Harbin’s air pollution.
In the latest step by authorities to fight unlawful immigration following an anti-migrant riot earlier this month, the city’s police chief said that Moscow police will raid apartments reportedly occupied by illegal migrants every Friday until the end of the year.
The initiative, announced by top cop Anatoly Yakunin on the order of Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, was promptly condemned by the head of Russia’s top migrant organization, who said it would instigate “immigrant phobia” in society. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny also ridiculed it, saying it would breed corruption — and allow illegal migrants to hide.
As the government rolls out more anti-migrant measures in reaction to the riot in Moscow’s Biryulyovo district, nationalists have stepped up their activities as well, with police preventing more than 120 activists, some armed with baseball bats, from raiding residences of migrants outside Moscow over the weekend.
Yakunin told a City Hall meeting Friday that police will “hold a massive crime-prevention operation code-named ‘Signal’ on Fridays,” RIA Novosti reported.
As part of the operation, city police working jointly with vigilantes, private security guards and other law enforcement organizations will raid apartments where migrants are reported to be living and patrol the streets in search for migrants, Yakunin said.
About 130,000 apartments in Moscow are leased illegally, Sobyanin told the meeting, RIA Novosti reported. All of them will be examined by the year’s end, Yakunin said.
Sobyanin asked Yakunin to “reinforce this work.”
“Until we know who lives in our houses, until the major part of them are registered, there will always be serious problems with public order,” the mayor said.
The new police measures were triggered by a riot of more than a thousand local residents and nationalists last weekend in Biryulyovo to protest the stabbing death of 25-year-old Yegor Shcherbakov on Oct. 10. The rioters blamed the killing on a migrant who worked at a local vegetable warehouse.
Police later detained Azeri national Orkhan Zeinalov for the crime, and initially he admitted his guilt but Thursday rescinded the confession. On Saturday, Azerabaijan sent Russia the second of two notes of protest over Russian authorities’ failure to organize a meeting of Azeri diplomats with Zeinalov, Interfax reported.
Muhammad Amin Madzhumder, head of the Russian Migrants Federation, told The Moscow Times on Sunday that he was “disappointed with the initiative” of police to carry out raids on migrants.
“Recently, our authorities have set a course for immigrant phobia,” Madzhumder said.
“Not only the police hold raids, but they take nationalists on them, which is a very dangerous trend,” he said, in an apparent reference to the numerous vigilante groups that participate in raids on residences where illegal migrants supposedly live and report them to police and migration officials.
In one example of cooperation between the authorities and civilians in finding illegal migrants, top Moscow region migration official Oleg Molodiyevsky on Saturday offered to let residents of the local town of Dolgoprudny take part in anti-migrant raids, Interfax reported.
{{European Union foreign ministers have arrived in Luxembourg for talks that will have the Syria conflict high on its agenda.}}
Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, said on Monday that the delegates will discuss how the bloc should act on the issue of Syria’s chemical weapons, political developments and humanitarian crisis.
Western and Arab diplomats have been trying to build support for long-delayed peace talks aimed at bringing together President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Syria’s opposition.
Nabil el-Araby, the Arab League chief, said in Cairo on Sunday the talks would convene on November 23.
However, Lakhdar Brahimi, the joint UN-Arab League envoy for Syria, said the peace talks were in doubt unless a “credible opposition” agreed to take part.
“There is an agreement to attempt to hold Geneva 2 in November, but the date has not been officially set,” Brahimi said.
“The final date of the conference will be announced at a later time.”
The opposition’s Western and Arab backers are facing resistance from some among the opposition to attending the Geneva talks as long as Assad remains in power.
France summoned the U.S. ambassador on Monday to protest allegations in Le Monde newspaper about large-scale spying on French citizens by the U.S. National Security Agency.
The allegations that the agency was collecting tens of thousands of French telephone records risked turning into a diplomatic row just as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Paris for the start of a European tour over Syria.
“I have immediately summoned the U.S. ambassador and he will be received this morning at the Quai d’Orsay (the French Foreign Ministry),” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters on the sidelines of an EU meeting in Luxembourg.
Earlier, France’s interior minister, Manuel Valls, said Le Monde’s revelations that 70.3 million pieces of French telephone data were recorded by the NSA between Dec 10, 2012 and Jan 8, 2013 were “shocking.”
“If an allied country spies on France or spies on other European countries, that’s totally unacceptable,” Valls told Europe 1 radio.
U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Rivkin declined immediate comment on reports that he had been called in by the French foreign ministry but stressed that U.S.-French ties were close.
“This relationship on a military, intelligence, special forces … level is the best it’s been in a generation,” Rivkin told Reuters as Kerry arrived in Paris.
In July, Paris prosecutors opened a preliminary inquiries into the NSA’s program, known as Prism, after Germany’s Der Spiegel and Britain’s The Guardian revealed wide-scale spying by the agency leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
“We were warned in June (about the program) and we reacted strongly but obviously we need to go further,” Fabius said. “We must quickly assure that these practices aren’t repeated.”
The NSA’s targets appeared to be individuals suspected of links to terrorism, as well as those tied to French business or politics, Le Monde wrote.
The Mexican auto industry is about to go on a $10 billion factory building spree, illustrating the nation’s rising economic challenge to rivals from the United States to China.
Japanese and German auto manufacturers are spearheading the drive, say parts suppliers and researchers who see more auto factories built south of the border than in the United States between now and the end of the decade.
The United States will consume the vast majority of the new cars, but Mexico’s domestic market has rebounded from a long slump, and in a sign of Mexico’s growing global role, auto exports outside of North America will rise faster than those to the United States.
BMW AG, Toyota Motor Corp and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz are expected to announce at least $2 billion of deals in the next year or two, according to supplier and other industry sources. That’s on top of nearly $6 billion in announced plants by Nissan Motor Co, Honda Motor Co, Mazda Motor Corp and Volkswagen AG.
U.S. automakers, all of whom have been building cars in Mexico since before World War II, will spend another $1 billion or more to upgrade Mexican plants. And Nissan and VW also are considering expansions at existing factories that could total $1 billion or more, according to sources familiar with their plans.
Mexico “is quickly turning into the China of the West,” said Joseph Langley, a senior analyst at Michigan-based research firm IHS Automotive, pointing to Mexico’s low wages, a strong supply base and a global web of free-trade agreements.
Mexican auto exports beyond North America are growing even faster than those within, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. They accounted for nearly 30 percent of the 2.4 million exported last year. Altogether Mexico built 3.0 million cars and trucks, according to Automotive News, compared with 10.4 million in the United States and 2.5 million in Canada.
By 2020, Mexico will have the capacity to build one in every four vehicles in North America, up from one in six in 2012, according to IHS.
The investment shift has implications for auto jobs and labor unions north of the border, particularly in Canada, which will see a 20 percent decline in production, IHS projects. Output will soar 62 percent in Mexico.
U.S. auto production will rise 12 percent, and Detroit-based automakers are expanding domestic production by ramping up the pace at existing factories to as many as three shifts running six days a week, said IHS. By those calculations, Mexico is building more auto plants than in the United States or Canada through 2020.
“It’s all about lower production costs and lower export costs,” said Michael Tracy, principal at the Agile Group, a Michigan-based auto consultancy. “That’s what Canada used to be — the place for low-cost manufacturing and shipping. Now, everybody is targeting Mexico.”
Mexico’s economy is seen growing faster than Brazil’s next year, underscoring the success of Mexico’s export-driven model versus regional economic powerhouse Brazil’s more protectionist policies. The promised auto investment could help Mexico challenge regional dominance by Brazil. Analysts are warning of excess Brazilian auto production capacity within five years.
Suppliers say the Detroit auto makers, with more than half the production capacity in Mexico, have not signaled any plans to expand vehicle output there. But General Motors and Chrysler this year have said they will install additional engine and transmission production capacity in Mexico.
Francois Hollande, France’s president, has said a Roma schoolgirl deported after being forced off a bus full of her classmates may be allowed to come back, but without her family.
Hollande’s comments on Saturday came amid protests by thousands of high school students against Leonarda Dibrani’s deportation which has sparked an outcry in France.
Manuel Valls, the interior minister, has also come under a barrage of criticism over the deportation.
“If she makes a request, and if she wants to continue her studies, she will be given a welcome, but only her,” Hollande said live on television, in his first remarks on the affair that burst into the limelight on Wednesday.
Much of the anger surrounding the 15-year-old has focused on how she was taken off a bus during a school outing earlier this month, before she was deported with her family to Kosovo.
A probe into the deportation published on Saturday found that it was lawful, but that police could have used better judgment in the way they handled it.
Dibrani herself turned down Hollande’s offer, speaking from the town of Mitrovica in Kosovo where she has been living with her family since their deportation on October 9 from the eastern French town of Levier.
“I will not go alone to France, I will not abandon my family. I’m not the only one who has to go to school, there are also my brothers and sisters,” she said.
Her father Resat, 47, added that the family would not be divided and would return to France by any means.
“My children were integrated in France, we continue to fight as my children are strangers here (Kosovo)”, he said.
Dibrani, her parents and five brothers and sisters had lived in France for four years while their asylum bid was processed. It was eventually rejected in the summer.
The Roma, also known as Gypsies, face discrimination across Europe and are widely believed to be the continent’s stateless people.
The premier of Australia’s New South Wales has declared a state of emergency for the next 30 days to give emergency services the authority to force evacuations in areas hit by the worst bushfires in several decades.
Premier Barry O’Farrell told local media that the measure would be implemented across the state on Sunday, as hotter and drier than expected weather conditions fanned huge fires in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
Australian fire crews stepped up containment efforts around several major bushfires with the weather forecast to deteriorate and officials warning of “unparallelled” danger from the worst conditions in 40 years.
More than 200 homes have already been destroyed and another 120 damaged by the fires which broke out across New South Wales state earlier this week, fanned by extremely high winds.
The worst of the fires, in the Blue Mountains, plunged Sydney into an eerie midday darkness as plumes of smoke and ash filled the sky.
One man has died so far trying to protect his property.
Firefighters had a reprieve on Friday and Saturday with an easing in the weather, but containment and property protection efforts were ramped up on Sunday ahead of a forecast deterioration in conditions set to include warmer temperatures and 100kph winds.
‘Unprecedented conditions’
NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said there would be several extremely difficult days ahead for fire crews, with conditions unprecedented in their danger to property and life.
“We’ve got what would be unparallelled in terms of risk and exposure for the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury communities throughout this week,” Fitzsimmons told reporters.
“If you are to draw a parallel, and it’s always dangerous to draw a parallel, at best you’d be going back to time periods in the late 60s.”
“The reality is, however, these conditions that we’re looking at are a whole new ball-game and in a league of their own.
An emergency warning was issued for the Blue Mountains village of Bell on Sunday morning, with residents urged to evacuate if they were able or “take shelter in a solid structure when the fire front arrives”.
A total fire ban was in place in the Greater Sydney and three other regions across the state until further notice.
Assistant police commissioner Alan Clarke said mandatory evacuation orders would be enforced in some areas, describing the risk as “far more extreme” than in past fires.
{{At least 43 people have been killed after a suicide bomber blew up a truck laden with explosives at an army checkpoint in Syria’s central city of Hama, according to the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.}}
The man blew himself up inside the vehicle on Sunday on a busy road on the outskirts of the government-held city, the Syrian state news agency SANA said.
It blamed the attack on “terrorists”, the term it uses to describe rebel forces trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian Observatory said the attack targeted an army checkpoint.
“At least 31 people, including regime troops, were killed when a man detonated a truck laden with explosives at a checkpoint near an agricultural vehicles company on the road linking Hama to Salamiyeh,” the Observatory said.
The Britain-based group said the death toll was likely to rise, as “there are dozens of wounded, some of them in critical condition”.
{{The U.S. economy has been hurt by a recent budget standoff in Washington and it is important that the nation does not go through another around of brinkmanship, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said on Sunday.}}
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program, Lew said he was confident the economy, which he described as resilient, would recover from the 16-day partial shutdown of the federal government.
He described events leading to the shutdown, which eroded both business and consumer confidence, as a political crisis rather than an economic one.
“We know that from the shutdown, there was a loss of economic activity,” Lew said. “We need to make sure that government does not go through another round of brinkmanship. This can never happen again.”
A last minute deal in Congress pulled the country from the edge of an unprecedented debt default. It restored government funding through January 15 and extended its borrowing authority through February 7, though the Treasury Department might be able to stave off a default for several weeks past that point.
There are worries that Wednesday’s deal may have set the stage for another standoff in the future.
Lew, the administration’s front man during the stalemate over increasing the country’s borrowing limit, has attempted to separate the debt ceiling from other policy conditions.
“I think the message that we have to send going forward is that there was a turning point on Wednesday night and this won’t happen again. It can’t happen again,” he said.
Similar sentiments were echoed by Republican John McCain, who told the NBC’s “Meet the Press” program that the shutdown hurt his party. McCain said there would be no second shutdown.
“Those involved in it went on a fool’s errand, that’s just a fact,” McCain said. “This has harmed the lives of millions of people and thousands of people in my state … I have an obligation to them to try to prevent that from happening.”
Lew did not quantify the damage to the economy.
Economists estimate the shutdown shaved as much a half a percentage point from fourth-quarter gross domestic product growth, with much of the direct hit through the loss of output from the federal government.
“It took an economy that is fighting hard to get good economic growth going, to create jobs for the American people, and it took it in the wrong direction,” Lew said. “This one was a little bit scary because it got so close to the edge.”
There’s a need to shift the focus away from fiscal policy, Lew said, arguing that the budget deficit as a share of the economy has been reduced significantly.
“Fiscal policy is very important. But there’s a lot we need to do to build and grow this economy,” Lew said. “We need some infrastructure. The farm bill needs to pass. The immigration bill is hugely important to the economy.”
{{The father of a Roma immigrant girl who has become a cause célèbre in France said on Friday that his family claimed to be from Kosovo in the hope of gaining pity – and political asylum.}}
The lie didn’t work, and he and his family were expelled as illegal immigrants. His revelation is the latest twist in a tale that has shaken the French government and sent thousands of French high school students protesting in the streets on behalf of Leonarda Dibrani and other similarly deported classmates.
Dibrani, 15, was taken by police from a school field trip last week, then sent to Kosovo with her family.
While such expulsions occur regularly as France tries to stem illegal immigration, the circumstances of the arrest – in front of Leonarda’s shocked classmates and teachers – outraged many.
France’s Socialist government is investigating, with Interior Minister Manuel Valls saying he expected the results of the investigation on Saturday.
Meanwhile, questions have surfaced over the Dibrani family history.
Activists who worked with the family initially said they had fled Kosovo because of discrimination against Roma, or Gypsies, and limited opportunities.
{{A lie for a better life}}
But Leonarda’s father, Reshat Dibrani, told The Associated Press on Friday that the Kosovo story was a lie aimed at achieving a better life for his six children.
Presenting copies of their birth certificates, he said he was born in Kosovo but moved to Italy years ago, and that his children were born in Italy but don’t have Italian citizenship.
He believed they had a better chance at permanently settling in France than Italy, so he moved the family to France, claiming the whole family was from impoverished, post-war Kosovo.
“We said in France that we had come from Kosovo so that we could get the papers,” he said in Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo. “If I had told them that I am Kosovar and that [the children] were born in Italy, then France would say, ‘Go back to Italy’.”
He said many immigrant families try similar stories. “You look to do what’s best for the family,” he said.
The case of the Dibrani family and an Armenian high school student expelled last weekend prompted protests by high school students around Paris.
Thousands of teenagers, saying the expulsions are unfair to immigrant children trying to get an education and a better life, rallied peacefully at the Place de la Bastille.
A few threw stones and pens at riot police trying to slow down their march, and were met by tear gas.
Leonarda Dibrani said she’s “very grateful” for the students’ support.
